


In step.

by Oxygen



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Origin Story, Some Medical Stuff, and then at some point he's uppercase junkrat, lowercase junkrat is there. he is the youngest boy in all of australia, some PERSONAL stuff, some WASTELAND RELIGION stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 14:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16430981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oxygen/pseuds/Oxygen
Summary: How do you get to a bar, held at knifepoint by a group of wastelanders you’ve never met?Junkrat runs through a book written in time and space and similes and colors and deafening choruses, all in a relentless tempo, all in step, all as it was meant to be, to get here.





	In step.

His feet are the only figment he remembers, walking in step, one two, one two, across the sand. No one speaks as they wear nothing but the clothes on their backs on the way to the grave.

The rest would have to be reconstructed.

It wasn’t a dark mood, he would say. No one seemed agitated and their words weren’t foul. Sure, the sun was fuckall hot, the heat from the earth and the roads did bleed through his footwraps, but that’s how it had always been.

His feet marched on, the steps pounding in his chest and head and ears and blood like… not machinery, not a drumbeat, not a rhythm, not time, not like anything else, because he would come to associate them with this thereafter.

He was small back then, he recalls, not above the chairs at the noodle shops that he’d crawl onto. Fingers thin, dirt and ash never escaping the thin ridges that covered them, but still soft. Mum encouraged him to comb his thick, blonde hair and clean his bruised up nails if nothing else, and that he would do in the shade of his pleasant little underground room as everyone got ready for the day.

The path wasn’t long. If he looked back, The Arrays stood a comfortable distance away, with its tall, glinting windmills and turbines alive and in motion. He could still see the settlement as they reached the roadside marker, a grave of sorts, with no body, just a mind and a soul and a family or some other collection of people to remember the dead by.

Two families to be exact, one for each body. Just over a dune, he saw a father and a child make their way towards them. The other party, they recognized.

This was a collision, and it was the anniversary. Melted metal and engines and tyres and smoke had twisted against eachother, floating and fighting their way into the sky. The evidence had been swallowed up, long gone as the scavengers picked at it and the winds carrying red earth dusted it over. He wanted to be sad, or nonchalant, or strong, but he didn’t have any feelings for the grave and the whole matter exactly.

It was a family friend he had no particularly positive or negative feelings for, understood they did a lot for his family, but just knew them from liminal meetings, crossing paths downtown or at small reunions. He still wanted to reach out to his mother’s and aunt’s hands and do something, though. Say something good, maybe summon some panacea from the waterless air.

More so, he wanted to close his eyes and wait for the awkward moment to pass.

“‘Afternoon,” his mother greeted. The father on the other side nodded, wind blowing stands loose from his tied up hair. His mother got on one knee first, then his aunt, and they repeated something they liked to repeat before the little altar made out of a dead and repurposed omnic husk.

The two invited him, and he knelt down shyly, the words fumbling their way around his teeth and tongue.

The father and the child knelt next, and said something else unlike his family’s words from the altar, but that felt all the same. Some kind of reverence, an extension of words through the earth and space and sky to somewhere else that he ultimately decided was the closest thing to a panacea.

Over the dunes, he saw, sees, this he can live through without piecing together, a cloaked figure. His heartbeat rises. Long black hair, bandaged face, bandaged body, lightly cloaked _everything_ in white, and the boy quickly begins to believe that this is a spectre or some thief coming to get them.

The spectre simply says something, and the father and child reply. They take their leave, and a book in his mind closes.

 

Books. Books weren’t always pages, sometimes they were on screens, and if he were being generous with the definition, sometimes they were in voices and memories and dreams. Regardless, they were always massive spaces and systems with millions of images and sounds and rhythms and times to run through and pull apart and stitch back together, to him at least.

Books weren’t always around, so he settled with making them, making his stories, his speeches, he was quick with words, quick with pen and paper, with aligning the few screws in the pipes of his underground house because he was curious, curious enough to spend hours spinning pan lids and studying spoons, connecting dots and tapping fingers and losing teeth and wondering what the cans at the back of the doctor’s dark room did.

He still liked his books, but they weren’t always around, so he grew into other things, like quick words and quick lies and a penchant for messing with machinery, and those things suited him just fine.

 

He must be older now, unnaturally taller now, and his skin is gnarled with lesions, foot decaying, breath sharp from vomiting. His brain bubbles and pops as the cement he lays on fries his brain.

He used to stub his toes a lot, the throbbing pain afterwards causing him to tell his mother that there was a little heart in his foot. He would always bounce back, though, bounce back from stubbed feet and cracked nails and the bloody corners of his dry lips.

Now, he would bounce back from this, since he knew this was only the overture to a great opera with a few horrible, off key notes scattered in between.

The Australian Liberation Front would know what to do about his foot. Carjack broke, dropped the full weight of the beast on it. It wasn’t healing right, wasn’t looking right, wasn’t feeling right, but he wasn’t about to lop it off just yet without an expert looking at it first.

They didn’t do much liberating these days, as there was nothing left to liberate in the triangle within Junkentown, The Arrays, and a settlement that escapes his mind right now since it was always changing names. Instead, they tended to the ill, or banded together to play cards, or whatever other things veterans or something like that term do. It was comforting. Stable. A good presence in the towns and on the maps to him at least, popular opinion about the group be damned.

This thought carries him as he plants his poorly gloved hands on the hot cement. Slips a knee under, flexes taut flesh over piercing bones, and rises up to hobble onwards, limping in step. Absently, he notices there’s no heart left to throb in his foot.

 

“Gotta save the leg,” they tell him. Not letting go of his foot, saving the leg. He never let go of his teeth, or watched his hair rain down, he made sure he could eat without searing pain and made sure to steer clear of the wreckage of the omnium.

“Gotta save you,” they tell him again, as the properly stitched stump turns red and yellow and green and black and tears, sweating bullets, arms caught in a tremor, leg receding upwards and bringing him to a terrible past and present and future all together again.

Weeks burn away from the pages of his book.

 

He’ll miss his leg, of course, is what he tells the veterans at the makeshift hospital. Very good to knee dilly-dally's in line with, and he is an impatient man.

Some mornings, he watches the muscles underneath his skin in quiet fascination, other times they grip him more harshly, more vividly, scattered and confused and contorted and lost.

Most days, he wraps the stump up and hops over to the kitchen.

The surgeon is a fucking rock or something, dead silent, absolutely precise and metered. Kills at the betting games, cuts through their poker faces like no one else. Up before sundown and asleep before sunrise like clockwork, unless they cart in some lost idiot like himself and then he springs up like he had never been resting at all.

First person he’s met who must not ever have a tremor in their hands, and doesn’t bat an eye when he asks to keep his skivvies on at the operating table.

Which is good, all things considered. Actually, more than good. He sees neat, intentional scars around the surgeons ribs, under his chest, and places a bookmark in his own mind to ask him about where he got that done later.

The rest of the motley crew is jovial, or hardened, or loud, but most importantly, all around reliable. A few are missing legs above the knee, so he bugs them to let him study the mechanisms that swing the leg back and forth in appropriate tempo. His nights and days are occupied messing with scrap from the back this way, not unusual, rather a welcomed return to normality for him.

Pneumatic experiments, arcs and clockwork, articulated hinges, all moving in rhythm and filling his head to the brim. The bikes fill his head too, as their engines roar to life when he fixes them up with the other mechanics, awkwardly cross legged on a chewed up towel. The speakers are tinny but they make do with raucous drumming and swaggering and laughing and booming voices. It fills and beats against his head and chest and heart in a juicy, good way, better than anything he’s had before.

He’ll be out soon, maybe. The months have passed, his leg is good enough to bear a rudimentary, hinged pegleg, and he’s even started pulling his weight around the place with odd tasks. He can see himself staying, but something tugs him anyways, as it always does. He’ll return, say hi, help out, but the horizon calls.

And so a tug turns into a push and then a shove when the spectre reappears, first a hum in the distance, then a wallrattling roar, then a harshly parked bike and a violently opened door, ripping pages out of his book with a hard, hard yank.

 

Without a greeting, the cloaked spectre, looming, large, bandaged in white, tells them to pick up what they can and run. The veterans seem to know him, seem to know his bike, so they don’t raise their fists and their guns. Instead they hit the legs.

His own legs hammer against the tilework and the earth in a lopsided manner, really put to the test, as he teams up with a driver. The heady smell of petrol fills his lungs, and it’s all wrong, all too fast, all too loud, it’s coming from the bikes and dropping from the sky and then it’s the house and then the flames lick all around him, almost consume him, and he has nothing left to do but run.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


What does he have left? Dog eared loose leaf, broken metronomes, fiery religions, scribbled over flashcards, chalkboards with no chalk, no chalk and certainly no home. Someone must have torn apart and consumed his trailer like the flames had consumed the infirmary, the home, and his mind.

So that’s what he does too.

 

Scrapping comes naturally to him. Maybe what teams could haul in within a week, he would spend a month hunting and rustling through wreckage for, slipping into loosely established properties for, until he would discover a set of shiny, good servos or buried caskets full of breadboards that would fetch him 10 times the bargaining power. This is what he had done before, alongside fixing cars and creating all sorts of things out of his less tradeable finds.

With everything left to gain, and nothing left to lose, not a home or a family or a loose collection of people he considered close to him, he wanders deep into the omnium.

 

Geiger counters set off when he walks by them, surely, rattling like teeth in his ears, like sand being rolled around together in his hands. Hand. Fire, explosives, acids, pressurized cans, mines, beartraps, those he could build now, had to, at the cost of something like another limb and some sensibility. Started with cans, found then within the exclusion zone, graduated to bigger things in a clandestine lab skirting between the Big Nothing and the wreckage of the omnium.

The dunes watched him. The dust blows and everything, even the sun and the horizon, become a moment of yellow and red that hide him from the rest of the world. At those moments, when he’s the furthest away from the world and maybe even himself, he summons not a panacea but a war incantation from the waterless air. Tried, tested, true, it doesn’t stumble and trip around his tongue and golden teeth anymore.

The veterans believed in eachother, the other family from the collision brought in a religion from the outside, and he, personally? He believed in a lot of things, reliable systems of machinery and fire and octane and chemistry and mathematics and flesh, some here, some there, some elsewhere, beyond in the realm of Valhalla.

This is how he spends his time in the wreckage of the omnium, burning through cabin fever into fever dreams into dream sequences into infinite sets.

Sets, sets, sets. He counts the sets of clean servos, silver, gold, copper, platinum, on and on and on he takes inventory.

 

What has he gained? Surely, some notoriety, something like his books again, some new language, something blue that glows in the night, a flat stone or slate with carefully etched ridges, hangs it around his neck, all his.

The caravans don’t dare to come here, he meets them at their outposts when they trade, until they want to meet him so bad that they come to him in the exclusion zone. Antsy to leave again, they never take a close look at his cloaked form and masked face.

 

He wanders deeper into the omnium, tries to anyways, blood in his ears, pounding in step as he hunts when he realizes there’s nothing left to hunt. He’s reached the end of the universe, and this is when the spectres watch him.

  


So many spectres.

 

Spectres in hazmat suits, so clean, so clear, so shimmery.

 

He unleashes armageddon on them, and they disappear in a flash of blue light.

  


These aren’t his spectres, cloaked in bandages and masks and loose hair that maybe burned up in the housefire or explosion from before. They’re scientists, and he can see the last of their mysterious light equipment fizzing out.

  


He grasps the slate, or rock, or heart strung around his neck in his fists. The light, although blue, bleeds red through the thin webbing between his fingers, cycling light to dark to light at an even tempo.

Scientists come from the Outside, something that didn’t exist to him before, when he was young, like Sydney or New Zealand or Japan or America didn’t exist to him, but of course he knew of now. ‘Knew’ in loose terms, because it existed in passing conversations and daydreams or encapsulated in a television screen.

 

The spectres, or scientists, had crossed over from somewhere else. They direct him onwards.

There was nothing left here in what he thought was the universe but he quickly and fully realizes was just a small sector of the Outback.

 

He couldn’t put three fingers to the slate, or rock, or heart, definitely a heart, and feel a beat, no fans, no whirring. It was alive even if he couldn’t feel it, he knew that much, and it began to blend and seep into lost schematics in the rubble. He saw the etched veins of the heart on carcasses of the omnics, saw the blue light in half living, half dead consoles of factories from before. Saw the patterns spangle across his vision as he heaved and purged radiation from his system, realizing this wasn’t sustainable, living here wasn’t.

 

He finds a bookmark, fallen, somewhere around his desk or in a new chapter during a reverie. This beckons him to the settlement of an amorphous name with a pack full of gold, copper, motherboards, fullblown motherboards, and even currencies. That’s where the doctor from the Australian Liberation Front was from, remembers something from a half-burnt conversation, so he hunts for people in a town where he is no one who will slice him open in an icefilled bathtub and sow him up again.

It’s not uncommon, but he forces _it_ to exist only in simile because he never had anyone else to share the abstract words or terms with. Never had a reason to. His voice is deeper in his chest, not really in his ears, because he’s lost a good bit of his hearing at this point, and that’s when he’s satisfied. He came in a stranger, and he leaves a stranger, to be someone with just a reputation and now a face in Junkertown.

And a name, he never bothered with one of those before, not by his hands anyway.

Junkrat.

Junkrat.

Jamison Fawkes, Junkrat.

It feels good when he speaks it.

 

And so a new chapter beings, maybe in a book of haphazardly stapled flashcards, which he takes care to title _Junkrat._

  
  
  
  


Sunrise, sundown, caught between sunset, the rose-gold settlement, half as old as time, looms before him.

The gates are greener, more dead at other hours, but Junkrat will remember them fondly at this time of the day.

  
  
  
  


What is there to do in Junkertown? Unmasked, Junkrat brings his ware to them. Makes a menace out of himself. He keeps the slate, the rock, the heart, now he knows to be an omnicardium, inside of his open door home just by the gates, not that they know, or maybe they do, who knows. Isn’t safe to keep it around his neck anymore, and the lab is too far away for his liking.

He taunts anyone who has itchy, scavenging, trespassing fingers with an open door home and a subterranean explosives system, they know this, they know this because the unmasked waresman is just like them but he brought information and firepower and a reputation with him from the wreckage of the omnium.

Taunts.

_The treasures in the omnium are impossibly vast._

Taunts.

_The halls of omnic weapons, of untarnished metal, of chains and copper wiring and filaments and nuclear bombs, extend forever._

**Taunts.**

_You won’t believe what I found._

And so the locusts descend upon him.

  
  
  
  


How do you get to a bar, held at knifepoint by a group of wastelanders you’ve never met?

Junkrat runs through a book written in time and space and similes and colors and deafening choruses, all in a relentless tempo, all in step, all as it was meant to be, to get here.

  
  
  
  


“If I knew where a priceless treasure was buried, I’d be **_thrilled_ ** to tell The Queen all about it!” He laughs, a little too loud in his ears, louder than bombs, watches lips.

“But I don’t! So… problem solved, yeah?”

“Afraid not,” he reads, feels the baritone reverberate through a pointed finger he so lightly lays on the towering gentleman’s chest. No currying favors here, he guesses. Fuck.

“You’ve run your mouth one too many times, **_Junkrat._ ** The Queen knows your hidin’ something.” A skulled fiend, face all fang tells him. Bullhorns on the skull? That’s--

A knife, too bright, no rust, carefully, dangerously, bounced on a palm with The Queen’s insignia on the handle tells him all he needs to know.

“You tell us where it is, or we **_bleed_ ** ya until you do.”

Now, they’re not getting to the core of him or his house or even his old lab without losing a limb or two in the process, but he’d prefer to keep his face and guts in one piece and his explosives dormant and unlit. They’re expensive, and hard to come by, both things!

So he does what any good salesman, what any good wastelander, what any good jazz musician would do, and _improvises_.

“Like I said,” Junkrat says slowly, keeping an eye on the blade and trying to beckon it down like one does with an aggressive, growling, foaming, salivating dog.

“I don’t know about any treasure. But if I **_did…_ ** and I’m not saying I do...” he adds, quieter.

“...Then I’d only share it with a **_friend_ ** . The kind of friend that would stick up for you, the kind that would **_kill_ ** to help you get out of a jam.”

His eyes dance around the bar, dance as they always do so it’s not particularly suspicious, but he’s scoping around for any keyword or friendly patron before sizing down the skulled fiend.

“A friend like that? I’d give him a **_ten percent_ ** share!” He shouts with more bravery and liquid courage than he should dare to have, shuts his eyes tighter than a rusted screw, and **points.**

Points at a fellow across the bar, who up until this day, Junkrat had known as well as he knows the skulled fiend and his looming, hulking friends, which is to say _not at all._

The skulled fiend slides up to this figure, this figure who reminds him of the spectres of before, sent from Valhalla or somewhere else at the most bizarre and dire of times. That’s wishful thinking, though, so Junkrat casually lowers his arms as the rest of the fiends have their eyes on the stranger. He unobtrusively brushes by a switch on his bombs.

Tick, tick, tick, he hears in his mind. He’s never been good at singing, but tempo? Tempo, footsteps, and clockwork, they all run through him, like a steady tread to a grave. There’s 4 minutes and 30 seconds on the dot before the bombs on his straps are ready to blow without him

The skulled fiend begins his bargain, leaning on the counter, blissfully unaware. The stranger sits, unmoving, back to him, but his eerie stillness gives away his tense state.

“Twenty percent!” Junkrat shouts from across the room over his bargain, catches the fiend’s lips for a brief few seconds.

“Don’t think she’s forgotten about what you did--”

“...Twenty five…?” Junkrat gets in, confidence waning as the stranger never even bothers to look at him. The fiend leans in, saying things he can no longer see, and the stranger leans further into the table, back muscles visibly tensing now.

“--willing to forget I saw you. For old times sake.”

Junkrat feels hands grip his shoulders, hot and heavy against his skin. He begins to jitter. 3 minutes left.

“--no need to make you squeal.”

This is when the glass shatters.

It seems the stranger was nursing a drink, beer going by the foam, and it cracks and shatters and splashes in a way he wish he could fathom but he _can_ feel the **_THUD_ ** of fists on the metal counter. A resounding **NO** as anything ever, but what about his own bargain to the stranger? His 25 percent share?

The skulled fiend whips back to Junkrat, descending upon him. “Queen don’t mind if we damage you,” he hisses, teeth bared, hands ready. The clamps around his shoulders get tighter. “Hell, she prefers--”

In one fell swoop, the stranger appears and kinghits the skulled fiend, orbitals cracking, teeth shattering. Fuck!

Then, with a broad swipe of his arm, in tempo with the slag, he clocks the other fiends closest to him. Cleaning up the refuse, avoiding Junkrat entirely. Grabs a chair and a bottle, and with a clean few strikes, disarms any hands he comes across. Pulls them in tight, masked forehead colliding with bare noses and skin, all in tempo, in tempo, in the complex drumbeats and footworks of battle.

Truth be told, there’s nothing left to do after that. A good bit of the bar has been left in shambles, and all of the fiends are well passed out. For good measure, the stranger huffs, still pissed off, and grabs the loudest, sleaziest, once skulled offender by the scruff of the neck. On his way back to his seat, he takes good aim, and launches him out of the fucking bar.

Junkrat stands, slackjawed, before he quickly scrambles to shut off his bombs.

“I knew it!” He cheers, and the flare of the stranger’s nose as he lifts his mask to drink some carafe left on the counter lets Junkrat know _he_ absolutely knows it’s a bluff.

“I knew you looked like a fine, upstanding sort!” That much, Junkrat says with full conviction. “And that treasure, oh yeah-- What did we agree on? Twenty, err, ten percent of it?”

_“Fifty.”_

Now, this stranger wore a mask, but the low, _low_ , baritone rumble of his voice was good on him, two simple syllables cutting through the watertank of his battered, ringing, muffled ears.

“What?” He says, not because he didn’t hear, but because maybe this’ll get the stranger to rethink and back down a bit. Aiming high, that’s respectable, anywhere the stranger bargains down to will still be mighty high considering the value of the omnicardium.

“Fifty percent,” the stranger says, steadfast. He readjusts his mask, and begins to head out. Junkrat follows suit.

“Fifty? That’s a good one,” he laughs, still shaky from the whole ordeal, but getting back there. “Best I can do is thir-- err, twenty-five.”

They walk in step, alright, maybe a little off, but Junkrat watches his steps, adjusting his to the slow, metered strides.

The stranger is silent. Junkrat’s cogs turn.

“You drive a hard bargain, mate. Twenty-eight!” He offers enthusiastically, like he does with tougher customers haggling over his most prized motherboards.

Not a word.

Not a single word.

Not a single. Fucking. Word.

“Fine!” He growls, defeated, throwing up his arms. “Fifty percent, and that’s my **final** offer!”

Deal.

The stranger snorts, as _if_ Junkrat was the brilliant, charitable philanthropist here saving lives and splitting his fortune first thing. As if it wasn’t the stranger's bargaining power that had won him over.

Well, most things with him were like pulling teeth. Just how it had to be with a good, not altruistic, not soft, not pleasant, not bankrupt, just _good_ , travelling salesman.

And so they walk in step, towards the center of the city, around bends, crowds watching, strangely in sync.

“Say, what’s your name?” Junkrat ventures. This stranger most certainly heard his name in the bar, but the same was not true in the other direction. It’d be weird to do such big business with such an unnamed stranger.

Junkrat gives him a quick one up, the white, frayed bandages wrapped around his strong forearms alarmingly familiar. But bandages are bandages, ubiquitous and universal, so he moves on.

“Roadhog,” the stranger, no, _Roadhog_ , says after a healthy pause.

 

 _Roadhog_ , Junkrat bounces around in his mind.

Roadhog.

Roadhog.

 

He nods to himself. Maybe at another time, he would burst into this and that and then and where, prodding and saluting a strong, curious, interesting name like Roadhog, but something… something sets him to a simmer, something puts his mind and tongue on the backburner, and he contemplates the quality of the light instead.

They walk in unison, quiet, quieter than the rose-gold light that descends upon the settlement half as old as time, and out of the corner of his eyes, he half-mindedly reads a decree from The Queen. Spraypainted in white and on the street level of an apartment complex, it reads:

 

 **Troublemakers will be** **_exiled._ **

 

And so he smiles as they walk in step to the gate.

 


End file.
